When it comes to sharpening a mind that feels dull, intellectual activities are a great way to boost your brain.
The only problem is a dreadful feeling many of us know all too well.
It arises when we dive into a new subject area that initially excites us…
The sensation of learning so many new facts is stimulating and we can’t wait to discover more.
Yet, a few hours or even minutes later, many of us struggle to remember anything we just read or watched.
If that’s you, the solution is to add mnemonics and other memory techniques to each and every act of intellectual engagement you pursue.
That way, you won’t wind up feeling empty after a short buzz.
Far from it. The wonderful feeling of fulfillment that comes from remembering what you learn will stand the test of time.
With that in mind, let me take you through my favorite intellectual activities and show you have applying mnemonics has made remembering what I’ve learned happen with ease.
Prepare for a game-changing lesson in boosting your cognitive skills by turning topics you find interesting into the ultimate brain exercise.
Understanding The Core Benefits Of Intellectual Activity
Before I take you into my list of top intelligence-boosting activities, let’s understand why it’s useful to improve your intellect in the first place.
It’s pretty obvious that the smarter you are, the more competitive you’ll be on the market. But there’s also these considerations to keep in mind:
- Learning and remembering dense subjects can help you cope with difficult issues like brain fog
- You can literally rewire your brain and remove bad habits when you understand conceptually why certain activities work
- Engaging in ample intellectual exercise and taking on challenging material can fast-track a rise in reading comprehension
- You’ll encounter ideas in other languages, perhaps inspiring a journey into bilingualism
That’s just scratching the surface.
Scientists publishing in the Journal of Aging Research have shown that engaging in intellectual activities reliably slows down the development of Alzheimers’.
The trick, however, seems to be daily cognitive exercise. Researchers have shown that older adults with complaints of forgetfulness do need the mental exercise much more often, something echoed by Dr. Christine Till who joined us a few years ago on this episode of the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast.
I suspect that younger people will benefit from ample intellectual activities as well, especially given what scientists have discovered about memory loss starting in our twenties. Timothy Salthouse and his team suspect it may have something to do with cortical thickness, which can indeed start to shrink even in those who are quite young.
All the more reason to get started with this list of powerful activities sooner than later – and make sure to combine them with mnemonics and other memory techniques for an extra layer of cognitive benefit.
The 10 Best Intellectual Activities To Mix With Mnemonics For Enhancing Your Cognitive Skills
As we go through this list, keep in mind that you don’t have to take on all of these activities. Even just 10-20% of them will make a difference.
In each case, I’ll suggest different ways to remember more as you engage in the different intellectual pastimes.
The main point to keep in mind is that you don’t avoid activities that seem like they might be too challenging. Instead, lean into them precisely because they are challenging. That’s the key to creating personal growth that lasts.
One: Explore The Vastness Of Philosophy
There are many types of philosophy and philosophical questions to explore.
That’s not to mention all of the famous philosophers and obscure figures who contributed so much to the art of thinking well.
When it comes to applying mnemonics, memory improvement has pretty much always been part of philosophy. Check out Rhetorica ad Herennium for a fascinating example. It teaches the classic memory techniques Frances Yates popularized in The Art of Memory.
But it also covers how to express yourself better, which definitely requires better memory.
Finally, I suggest looking into the memory improvement works produced by philosophers like St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Giordano Bruno and Aristotle.
There are also philosophers of education to follow who used memory techniques, such as Hugh of St. Victor. I applied one of his most famous mnemonic devices in this case study video:
Two: Creative Writing
Cooking up a story exercises many aspects of your mind and brain.
You have to remember your own character names, plot points and often a plethora of descriptive details.
When I wrote Flyboy, the first novel in my Memory Detective series, I used the same technique for memorizing names I’ve always used when giving demonstrations at live events.
I find memorizing fictional character names an even greater challenge because I don’t see them in my mind’s eye. Since there might be some aphantasia involved in this issue, writing fiction has been a great activity.
True, my fiction is a bit on the intellectual and conceptual side. That’s why I always work hard during revision to make the writing much more multi-sensory.
Taking that extra step in itself provides a great amount of intellectual fulfilment because it involves imagining what will please the reader. Any time you use your imagination to consider the perspective experience of another person, you’re giving yourself some fantastic mental stimulation.
Three: Include Critical Thinking In All Of Your Intellectual Activities
Hang on, some people might be thinking. How is philosophy different from critical thinking?
At one level, it’s not necessarily different.
But you don’t have to be a philosopher to:
- Understand the importance of critical thinking as a kind of aid to memory
- Benefit from differentiating your objective and subjective experiences or reasoning
- Learn about the memory biases that shape how you perceive the world
The trick is to get in plenty of critical thinking exercises, reading the best possible critical thinking books and using them to practice remembering what you read.
One simple way to using critical thinking is to develop a Memory Wheel that helps you question everything.
The simplest way to get started involves getting the main questions up on an imaginary wheel in your mind: What, who, when, why, where, how.
I know this sounds simplistic, but how often do you actually remember to rotate through these essential questions? Far too often we take things at face value, and these questions exercise our intellectual faculties. All the more so because they are so direct and simple.
Four: Solve Authentic Puzzles and Play Science-Backed Brain Games
More and more, people are pouring their lives into online activities. Although there’s a ton of good that has come from sharing our lives online, digital amnesia has arisen despite the convenience of playing many brain games on your phone.
Ironic, isn’t it?
To help heal the problem of forgetting, it’s useful to spend more time with physical objects like puzzles and playing cards.
To express my thoughts on just how important practicing memory with physical objects is for me personally, I wrote and narrated this video essay:
The activity with memorized playing cards I’m engaged with in this video involves the memdeck methods I use as a card magician.
Some people might say that there’s nothing intellectual about fooling people with card tricks. However, that’s not the case at all. It is one of many deeply stimulating cognitive activities.
To succeed as a magician, you have to learn a ton about audience management. You need to use a lot of deliberate practice to train your procedural memory.
And as Adam Gopnik puts it in his excellent book, The Real Work, the magician has to master creating experiences for others that the magician cannot experience for him or herself.
A heady thought, isn’t it?
All the more reason to include it in this list of knowledge enhancement activities.
As a final point, many magic tricks are in fact little more than puzzles. The magician’s job is to hide this fact in order to create the illusion of transformation, teleportation of some other effect.
But if you get into magic yourself, you’ll soon learn that there’s a lot of math and logic behind how even the simplest magic trick works. Many teachers of magic and misdirection often talk about various magic plots as “problems” with “solutions.”
In other words, magic tricks are puzzles through and through. Perhaps the most authentic of all puzzles you can work on due to the seeming paradox Gopnik underlines: you as the magician can never experience the illusion you are creating.
Five: Take Up Performance-Based And Skill-Oriented Activities
I’ll never forget talking with a Magnetic Memory Method Masterclass participant recently.
He told me his mind was blown when he realized that chess masters who play multiple opponents at the same time aren’t actually visualizing the boards in their minds. If anything, they’re thinking about a variety of spatial relationships.
In many cases, this is exactly right. Playing chess gets you into much higher and more abstract levels of thinking than you might realize until you get into it. The trick is to go beyond merely knowing your chess openings, and spend enough time playing games with a wide variety of players at varying levels of skill.
It’s the same thing in music. You might know your circle of fifths inside out. But unless you play regularly with musicians at varying levels of skill, you’re not getting the mental workout you could be.
In any case, there’s a relationship to be made between chess strategies and music theory. Exploring what that relationship is combined with actually partaking in both activities will give your brain a massive boost.
Six: Do Your Own Scientific Research
Citizen science is very important. In fact, I was heartened to see recently that the memory expert Tyson Yunkaporta will be keynote speaker at an event to teach its important near me soon. If you haven’t read his book Sand Talk, I highly recommend it.
Of course, it makes sense to educate yourself about what science is and its history.
But the larger point is that all scientists are citizens themselves and only human.
The more scientifically literate people we have who engage in actual research themselves, the better our communities will flourish.
And I’m not just saying these words without some skin in the game myself. I’ve practiced memory science for over a decade now.
It has provided an incredible “north star” and led to many fascinating discussions with other people involves in memory science in a variety of ways. In addition to Dr. Yunkaporta, you can listen to me doing research by interviewing people like:
And many more.
The best part? Many people engaged in all kinds of science have sent me the questions they’d also like to hear memory experts answer. None of it would have happened without people like me willing to engage in scientific research.
I’m heartened to see the next generation coming up too through people like Aidan Helfant and Ronald Johnson.
I hope you’ll get into it too!
Seven: Learn A Language (Even If You Have To Do It Badly)
Many people avoid language learning do to either perfectionism or all-or-nothing-ism. Of course, there are more possible objections than that, but they are the major ones I see all the time in my inbox.
The problem with waiting for the perfect time to start or wanting to be fluent overnight is that you miss out on all the benefits of learning even just a handful of words.
For example, you can get a great intellectual workout just by visiting Etymonline and studying word origins in your mother tongue.
I’ve got tons of posts all about how to learn languages, but the larger point is to just get started.
As we saw in research I started above, many of us need daily intellectual stimulation to keep our memory abilities humming.
And it can be as simple as finding a “word a day” server and reading the emails they send. As I follow this recommendation myself, I’ll be posting some of my mnemonic examples in the Magnetic Memory Method Reddit Community.
Eight: Learn And Apply Literary Analysis
I was blessed that I got to study literary theory for several years at university, including a strong exposure to film theory. On the strength of both, I wound up teaching Film Studies at the University of Saarland as a Mercator Scholar.
The value of being able to analyze what a book, play or poem means has never been clearer to me than when I spoke with Shakespearian actor Ashley Strand.
As he explained in our discussion, thinking analytically about what we read is an aid to remembering information better.
Whether it’s Shakespeare, the Bible or even Sherlock Holmes, learning to analyze texts provides the mind endless workouts.
The value compounds over time too. The more you think about one text, the more ways you’ll see that it connects to others in a variety of genres.
Nine: Build Your Appreciation For Art
For many years, one of my core intellectual activities was simply going to art galleries.
Many of these I turned into Memory Palaces, as discussed in this post.
Another fantastic thing to do is memorize the names of artists and the dates of specific pieces.
To memorize dates easily, I recommend learning these two techniques:
You can also use number rhymes, but a combination of the Major with a PAO tends to work best for historical dates.
Another way to appreciate art more is simply to create it. My wife and I took an art class together and not only learned a lot about visual expression. It created a lot of bonding between us too.
Ten: Keep Up With Technological Trends
This one almost goes without saying, especially in the overwhelming tsunamis of technological change we’re going through now.
But as I mentioned above, we get the most of leaning into the intellectual activities that challenge us.
One way that I leaned into it myself was to explore chatGPT for language learning. Turns out it works great, especially with an intermediate technique called “laddering.”
Don’t Even Try Incorporating Intellectual Activities Into Your Daily Routine
There’s a catch when it comes to getting the most out of the activities you choose to stimulate your brain.
You need to make time for them.
Sure, there are ways to use mnemonics in your everyday life. Lots of ways.
But the key is to schedule ample time for taking your mental life seriously.
If you’re going to focus on reading and doing some serious literary analysis, set up an appropriate study place so you can really absorb and enjoy the activity.
In today’s world, everyone’s gotten into such a hurry that we’ve lost the joy of stimulating the mind.
But the good news is that simply thinking through how you’re going to honor the activities we’ve discussed today is itself an activity that will exercise your mind.
And if you need help with the most important memory technique of all, give my free course a try:
It gives you four video lessons and some worksheets that take you through everything you need to know.
That way you’ll be prepared with the best possible mnemonic strategies ready to go when you dive into the activities you choose to develop your mental powers.
Enjoy these techniques and how they keep your mind supple and dexterous over the years to come.
